The earliest European pictorial block prints were
religious souvenirs known to-day as 'helgen.' The oldest to come down
to us, a representation of the Virgin, is dated 1418. It is now in
the Royal Library at Brussels. Until this was discovered (1840) a
print representing St. Christopher, dated 1423, was the earliest
known. It is now at Manchester. These 'helgen' were black and white
prints, but often, as was the St. Christopher, were painted
afterwards or colour was stencilled on them. Probably they were so
cheap and common that in the usual course of events they were
destroyed. There is, however, sufficient evidence that there was a
brisk trade in these prints, many of which are supposed to have been
printed in the monasteries.

PLAYING CARDS

About the same time playing cards began to be
printed from blocks. Originally they were drawn and painted by hand,
a craft largely carried on by women. The engravers of playing cards
seem to have been a class apart. This was before the days of the
printing press; impressions were taken from a block by rubbing. To be
a printer in those days required little capital or plant. Mr. Hessels
has suggested that at that time people bought engraved blocks from
the engraver and printed from them as required, not purchasing
ready-made printed matter as we do to-day. This primitive method of
printing still obtains in Tibet. The monasteries own the blocks, and
whenever a copy of a book is wanted by anyone it is printed page by
page, the charge varying from 3d. to 6d. according to the size of the
page. By 1440 playing cards were being coloured by stencil and the
reverse of them often had diaper patterns in one colour printed on
them. The playing cards were often elaborately pictorial.

SEMI-BLOCK BOOKS

Also at this time it began to be the custom to
leave spaces in a manuscript for block printed illustrations to be
pasted. These were known as semi-block books.

BLOCK BOOKS - GUTENBURG

The next step was the block book proper - each
page, text and illustrations, cut on a single block. The block book
died a natural death when the first book to be printed from movable
type appeared. This was a Bible, printed by Gutenburg and issued in
1456, and was followed the next year by a Psalter. Both in Europe and
in the East the earliest attempts at pictorial block printing were
religious in subject.

IMPETUS TO BLOCK PRINTING

If the appearance of paper in the market was an
impetus to block printing by providing a cheap and ideal substance on
which to print, what can be said of the invention of movable type? It
was, of course, eventually the death-knell to the scribe and
illuminator and a serious set-back to the miniaturist; but the
artists quickly saw the possibilities of the new invention and almost
at once were producing some of the finest block print
illustrations.

ST. ALBANS BOOK OF 1486

I believe I am right in saying that the earliest
piece of European colour block printing is in a book that was printed
at St. Albans in 1486 (ten years after Caxton had set up his press at
Westminster), which has many coats of arms printed from wood blocks
in colour.

MAIR OF LANDSHUT - CHIAROSCURO

At the very end of the fifteenth century Mair of
Landshut began to print his wood cuts and metal engravings on
coloured paper, or paper that he had coloured previously with a wash
of water-colour, being especially fond of a pale green. He would then
add high lights with Chinese white water-colour. In a year or so this
led to the production of the first real European colour block prints
as opposed to black and white prints coloured by hand. The type of
print to which Mair's mixed method of printing and painting led was
known as a chiaroscuro print, a peculiarly European product. The
science of light and shade was still a comparatively new thing.
Chiaroscuro prints were generally printed from three blocks. The
first printed the main outlines of the design; the second printed a
light tint over the whole print except for the high lights, which
were cut away from the block. The result was that the print at that
stage resembled a drawing in black on a toned paper with the high
lights added in white, as was Mair's practice. The third block added
the half tones. These prints usually were printed in tones of the
same rather neutral colour. They were strictly monochrome prints
there was no attempt to render local colour.

EARLY CHIAROSCUROS

He would be a brave man who stated positively who
invented the chiaroscuro print. Ugo da Carpi for long was allowed
successfully to claim its invention but the earliest da Carpi
chiaroscuro that has come down to us is dated 1518, 12 years after
the only known print of this kind by Lucas Cranach. And what about
Mair? Although I believe no chiaroscuro print by him has been found,
that is not to say that he may not have produced one or more at the
end of the fifteenth century. Hans Baldung, Wechtlin, de Necker and
Hans Burgkmair were all early in the field. In a short lecture like
this we must not allow ourselves to be side-tracked into a
controversy of this kind. But we must remember that the history of
engraving is full of the names of engravers who claimed to be the
inventor of a process that already existed. That is what da Carpi
did. He used two, and sometimes three, blocks, adding or omitting the
third at will. Chiaroscuro prints usually were reproductions of
famous pictures. It is interesting to note that even some of the
earliest designers of these prints, such as Burgkmair, did not always
cut their own blocks, and I think it more than likely they handed
them to a printer to be printed. What I have never been able to
discover is what sort of publishing organisation existed for the
distribution of these prints. Did an artist publish his own prints or
did a printer distribute them amongst his correspondents? Koberger, a
printer-publisher of about this period, had agents all over Europe. I
think it is highly probable that the print-makers gladly availed
themselves of such a magnificent organisation, just as the Japanese
prints were published by booksellers. Perhaps in addition pedlars or
travellers were employed to sell these inexpensive pictures in the
market places of South Germany and North Italy.

ETCHED KEY PLATE

By 1520 the chiaroscuro process had been so
developed that sometimes eight blocks were used for printing a single
print. Eighteen years later we find an etched key plate taking the
place of the wooden key block, the tones still being printed from
blocks.

ELIZABETHAN WALLPAPERS

England produced no chiaroscuro print-makers in
the sixteenth century, but in Tudor times her artists did produce
some wallpapers, printed from blocks (probably of pear wood) and
coloured by brush or stencil. I mention wallpaper printing because in
the eighteenth century it was to develop into elaborate pictorial
colour block printing.

FRENCH CHIAROSCURO. BUSINCK

It was not till about 1625 that the art of
chiaroscuro print-making was taken up in France. Businck, the wood
engraver, seems to have been the first to practise it. Amongst other
prints he did a series of small busts of Saints, extraordinarily
robust in feeling and very well printed. All the prints of his that I
have seen are in bistre or a warmer brown.

WILLIAM BAYLEY'S 'ENGINES OF BRASS'

In 1691 an Englishman, William Bayley, was granted
the sole use of his invention for printing in colour with several
'engines of brass.' What these engines were we do not know, but they
seemed to have been a failure. Several map engravers and
illustrators, finding times hard, sought a more lucrative field for
their talent in wallpaper production, and by the beginning of the
eighteenth century some architectural wallpapers were being
produced.

FIRST ENGLISH CHIAROSCUROS

The first English chiaroscuro prints date from
1722, when Elisha Kirkall published 12, engraved by himself, after
Italian old masters. He mezzotinted his keyplates.

POND AND KNAPTON. LE SUEUR

About 1734-5 Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton
produced in this country a number of reproductions of drawings from
the Richardson and other collections in the chiaroscuro method, with
keyplate and wood blocks. Across the Channel, Nicholas le Sueur, a
member of a great engraving family, was producing chiaroscuros with
etched or engraved keyplates.

J. B. JACKSON

One of the most interesting personalities in the
history of European colour block print-making was John Baptist
Jackson. He served his apprenticeship under Kirkall and then went to
Paris, where Papillon fils taught him wallpaper engraving. Jackson
seems to have behaved rather badly to his master, and went off to
Rome and from thence to Venice. During his three years there he
published a series of 27 large chiaroscuros chiefly after Titian,
Bassano, Tintoretto, Veronese and Rembrandt. Chiaroscuro prints often
throw interesting light on which old masters were most popular at the
time. Jackson then returned to England, but finding no demand for his
chiaroscuros, he tried to popularise colour block printing by
publishing a book about it, and started a wallpaper factory at
Battersea. He produced a number of wallpaper prints of antique
statues in niches which he prided himself were a worthy substitute
for real sculpture. If you did not want the Apollo Belvedere or the
Medicean Venus complete in niche, he could offer you landscapes after
Salvator Rosa, Claude, views of Venice by Canaletto, copies of all
the best painters, Italian, French, Flemish. These were his famous
prints in 'their natural colours,' anticipating the polychrome prints
of Japan by a decade. Jackson worked on a large scale; his engraving
was excellent. He did not approach the polychrome colour print in the
same way as the Japanese were to approach it. Jackson used no outline
keyblock into which colour passages were fitted. He superimposed his
colours as a painter would his washes. His so-called 'natural
colours' were only natural by comparison with the conventional
monochrome of the chiaroscuro print. Actually they resembled the
colouring of tapestries. Sometimes he employed seven or eight blocks.
It was a method that did not demand great accuracy of register.
Register was still very bad and most colour block prints and
wallpapers had to be touched up afterwards with a brush.

THE ECKHARDTS

By 1750 George and Frederick Eckhardt, working at
Chelsea, had improved multi-colour block printing. They printed their
designs on paper, silk and linen indiscriminately. By now almost
everyone who started a wallpaper factory claimed a process of his
own. A man called Masefield claimed, with the usual modesty of the
advertiser of those days, that his method surpassed 'anything of the
kind yet accomplished.' He advertised landscapes, festoons and
trophies. Matt Darley, who engraved some of the plates for
Chippendale's 'Directory,' started a factory in the Strand and
produced designs "in the Modern, Chinese and Gothic Tastes for Town
and Country." Knowing his clientele he offered "large allowances for
ready money."

CHINOISERIES

From 1765 to 1780 was the great period, especially
in France, of Chinoiseries. Madame de Pompadour, who had interests in
the French East India Company, encouraged the taste for things
Oriental, and in her inimitable way influenced Boucher to design
"fantastic cartoons" for tapestry in what he believed to be the
Chinese idiom, cribbed from lacquer. Elaborate wallpapers of similar
subjects were produced from blocks.

CLASSIC TASTE

If you could not stomach things Oriental then you
probably cultivated a nice classical taste fed by the recent
discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Reveillon, a Frenchman,
catered for such taste and employed first-rate artists. The elaborate
pictorial papers he produced were, of course, block printed. At the
Revolution Reveillon had to fly to England.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Towards the end of the eighteenth century William
Blake was experimenting with a printing process from relief metal
plates akin to that adopted by Mr. William Giles to-day. In an
impervious liquid, Blake painted his design in reverse on a copper
plate and bit the rest away in an acid bath, so that ultimately the
part that had been drawn stood up in relief. He produced several
block books by this process which are now extremely rare. As a rule
he printed these in an orange outline and printed over the
illustrations from pieces of millboard on which he had painted in
reverse the main colour masses, mixing his pigment with varnish or
glue or possibly paste. Actually, it was a monotype or monoprint, and
each impression was different. Each needed a considerable amount of
touching up afterwards. The quality of the colour is very exquisite,
due largely to its accidental qualities. Technically, from the point
of view of the printer, these 'prints' are weak, and Blake very soon
abandoned the process as impracticable.

ZUBER'S PANORAMAS

Zuber, in about 1803, began to publish an
incredible series of landscape and seaport panorama wallpapers. By
then the simplest pictorial wallpaper - a fairly large panel -
required at least 300 blocks. A Cupid and Psyche panel took 1,500,
and some of the later landscape papers needed nearly 5,000
blocks.

WALLPAPER PRINTING FROM ROLLERS

In 1830 wallpapers began to be printed from wooden
rollers, and though the presses were turned by hand 200 rolls a day
were printed on a single press.

BAXTER PRINTS

In 1835 George Baxter took out a patent for
printing in oils from a series of wood blocks. He used copper and
steel plates for the lines of his designs and sometimes added tone by
spirit ground aquatint and stipple. He used from 10 to 20 blocks for
a print; his ink seems to have been transparent printing ink, which
dried with an unpleasant shiny surface. The colour of proofs from the
same design varies very much. As a rule, it was atrocious, but just
occasionally, as though by accident, as in one of the proofs of 'The
Parent's Gift' in the British Museum, the colour is less offensive.
It was a very mixed method - he worked usually on a small scale and
his prints are of no aesthetic value.

MORRIS WALLPAPERS

William Morris experimented rather unsuccessfully
with printing wallpaper from zinc plates with oil paints. 1867 saw
the production of the last great scenic wallpaper. Towards the end of
the century the Germans, always a great printing nation, found
linoleum could be substituted for wood. More recently rubber and
other synthetic surfaces have been used.

The revival of the colour block print in this
country, which began in the nineties, was due to J. D. Batten,
Professor A. W. Seaby, F. Morley Fletcher and William Nicholson.
William Giles, as already mentioned, has developed Blake's process,
using etched metal relief plates for his colour prints.